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A Reform-Driven System

Via this ambitious strand of work, we seek to deepen and strengthen the K–12 system’s capacity to deliver quality education to every child, based on rigorous standards and ample choices, by ensuring that it possesses the requisite talent, technology, policies, practices, structures, and nimble governance arrangements to promote efficiency as well as effectiveness.

Jack Jennings was the most influential education policy staffer on the Democratic side of Congress—probably on both sides—for the past half century. He served on the House Education Committee team for some twenty-seven years, then founded and led a well-regarded quasi-think tank called the Center on Education Policy, which continues to issue useful studies.

His new book, timed to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, is forceful, opinionated, informative, and sometimes quite wrong. (A simple example: He several times attaches my own stint in the Education Department to the wrong president. More importantly, he misstates Richard Nixon’s K–12 proposals and incorrectly describes their handling by Congress.) As Andy Rotherham says on the back cover, “If you agree with everything in this book, you probably didn’t read it closely.”

But there’s much useful history and perceptive analysis here, as well as some pie-in-the-sky recommendations for the future. Particularly interesting to me was how Jennings traced the onset of federal involvement with results-based accountability to the 1988 Title I amendments shaped by Committee Chairman Augustus Hawkins. Those revisions, he writes, “marked a change in attitude among congressional leaders, characterized by increased demands on educators to...

Like pretty much everyone who is passionate about closing the achievement gap, I’m interested in Success Academies. I’ve read Eva Moskowitz’s book, Mission Possible: How the Secrets of the Success Academies Can Work in Any School, and watched the videos that come with it. But I’m still not sure what to think. The extraordinary results might be due to creaming motivated families, or not backfilling after the early grades, or too much test prep. These questions will likely be answered over the next several years.

Still, students are obviously getting a good education in Success Academies. If there were no test prep (or any manipulations of the student body), then I think the test scores would still be impressive, if not extraordinary.

So what are they doing? Charles Sahm’s new article in Education Next provides some answers. Having visited four Success Academies and interviewed staff, supporters, and critics, he presents a richer picture of the schools than previous accounts.

Without detracting from the complex array of supports needed to attain strong results, I think two of Success Academies’...

I’m a bit of an education technology skeptic, but I come by it honestly. No field overpromises and underdelivers more than education. And nowhere within education is that more true than among education tech’s various cheerleaders. For years, we’ve heard innovators, disruptors, and paradigm shifters natter on about twenty-first-century skills, flipped classrooms, and the “school of one.” Meanwhile, the experience of school for most kids remains the same, with the same mediocre outcomes year after year. Read my lips: No new TED Talks.

So I confess that I opened Greg Toppo’s The Game Believes in You with an arched eyebrow. I’m not ready to abandon my skepticism entirely, but Toppo made a persuasive case that games do many of the things we expect schools and teachers to do—differentiate instruction, gather data, and assess performance—and very, very well.

He started to win me over by not making the standard, clichéd education tech enthusiast’s argument about student engagement and “meeting the children where they are.” I don’t think...

The forty-fourth governor of Arkansas is very familiar with both politics and presidential campaigns. He started his political career in 1993 as the lieutenant governor of Arkansas. He leveled up to governor in 1996, a gig he held until 2007. Dreaming even bigger, he ran for president in 2008. He considered running in 2012, but ultimately didn’t. And here he is in 2016, back in the mix. His long career has brought many opinions on education, some of which have changed significantly. Here are ten:

1. Common Core (2015): “I also oppose Common Core....We must kill Common Core and restore common...

Fiorina is neither a popular talking head nor a seasoned politician, so her stances on the issues aren’t as publicized as those of her competitors. Nevertheless, she’s been pretty vocal the last few months, and her senatorial run necessitated some opining. So in this sixth installment of the Eduwatch 2016 series chronicling candidates’ views on today’s biggest education issues, here are Fiorina’s positions:

1. Common Core: “I don't think Common Core is a good idea. I don't support it.” January 2015.

2. No Child Left Behind: “No Child Left Behind helped us set high standards for our students, and many of our students have met and exceeded that bar.” August 2010.

3. School choice: “Parents should be given choice, competition, and accountability in the classroom.” February 2015.

4. Non-cognitive skills: “Teaching entrepreneurship, innovation, risk taking, and imagination comes with local control, and we have to maintain this...

Ben Carson announced yesterday that he’s running for president. The retired neurosurgeon has never held political office, but he was the first doctor to successfully separate twins conjoined at the head—so there’s that. He’s also the fifth subject in the Eduwatch 2016 series chronicling candidates’ stances on education.

Bernie Sanders, the socialistsenator from Vermont, declared his candidacy for president last week. He’s also the subject of the fourth installment of the Eduwatch 2016 series chronicling presidential candidates’ stances on education issues.

Sanders talks more about higher education than K–12 schooling. Aside from voting against an anti-Common Core amendment back in March, he hasn’t said anything about the controversial standards. And I couldn’t find any reference to school choice. Nevertheless, he hasn’t been silent:

1. Early childhood education: “We must do away with the archaic notion that education begins at four or five years old. For far too long, our society has undervalued the need for high-quality and widely accessible early childhood education.” February 2014.

2. Standardized testing: “Promote creative learning by doing away with 'fill-in-the-bubble' standardized tests, and instead evaluate students based their understanding of the curriculum and their ability to use it creatively.” May 2015.

As part of its attempt to get rid of PARCC, the House added text dictating that state assessments “shall be nationally normed, standardized assessments.” This is worrisome, as there is a big difference between norm-referenced and criterion-referenced tests.

A norm-referenced test determines scores by comparing a student’s performance to the entire pool of test takers. Each student’s test score is compared to other students in order to determine their percentile ranking in the distribution of test takers. Examples of norm-referenced tests are the Iowa Test of Basic Skills or the Stanford 10 exams. A criterion-referenced test, on the other hand, is scored on an absolute scale. Instead of being compared to other students, students are compared against a standard of achievement (i.e.,...

In a previous review, my colleagues examined a National Charter School Resource Center (NCSRC) report that analyzed states’ charter policies regarding access to district-owned facilities. In a new report, NCSRC narrows its focus to charter school facilities in California. Golden State charters were asked to complete a survey about their facilities and to allow an on-site measurement; these results were then supplemented by data on school enrollment, student demographics, and funding. The results offer a sobering picture of charter facilities in the state. Charter school facilities are generally smaller than the size recommended by the California Department of Education; classrooms for elementary, middle, and high schools are, on average, between 82 and 89 percent of the state standard size (it is worth nothing that state size standards might not be appropriate for all schools in all situations). Charter facilities as a whole are 60 percent smaller than state site size recommendations, even after adjustments are made for enrollment differences. California charters also spend varying amounts of their per-pupil funding on facilities; charters that own their buildings pay an average of $895 per pupil; charters located in a school district facility pay an average of $285 per pupil; and...

There are no fearsome beasts or rings of fire, but Marc Tucker’s newest jeremiad for Education Week is an apocalyptic prophecy worthy of a revival tent. Speculating on the origins of our collapsed standards, Tucker settles on four horsemen of academic mediocrity: grade inflation, the eroding prestige of the teaching profession, a standards movement hijacked by the accountability movement, and the consumer transformation of colleges and universities. Taken together, he claims, these factors have produced four decades of educational stagnation and a climate in which colleges teach high school math—and high schools teach grade grubbing. As Fordham’s own Chester Finn reminds us, we’ve been dumbing down our expectations for decades, and the results justify some doom saying.

Like the rose that grew from concrete, the inimitable Dan Willingham has taken his talents over to the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog for a five-part series on reading. His terrific posts, of which three have been published so far, advance arguments from his new book. They will also raise points familiar to fans of Fordham’s own literacy guru, Robert Pondiscio. In the first, Willingham mounts a defense of the Common Core standards as a powerful catalyst for early literacy.